Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  There was more noisy clanging of bolts, and the double doors opened, letting out a wave of light, warmth, and music.

  I entered. The door from the hall to the dining room was open, and I could hear a radio playing.

  NKVD officer Romanov was standing in front of me. Or rather I was in front of him, and he, a squat, stout, restless man who smelled of perfume, was revolving around me, his quick black eyes examining my person.

  The prisoner’s smell hit his nostrils, and he took out a snow-white handkerchief and shook it. Waves of music, warmth, and eau de cologne washed all over me. The main thing was the warmth. The Dutch stove was red-hot.

  “So we meet,” Romanov kept saying with delight as he moved around me, waving his scented handkerchief. “So we meet. Well, come through. . . .” And he opened the door to the next room, a little study with a desk and two chairs.

  “Sit down. You’ll never guess why I’ve called you in. Have a cigarette.” He poked about in the papers on the table. “What’s your name? Patronymic?”

  I told him.

  “Year of birth?”

  “It’s 1907.”

  “You’re a lawyer?”

  “I’m not actually a lawyer, but I was a student of Moscow University law faculty in the second half of the 1920s.”

  “So you’re a lawyer. That’s excellent. Just sit there for now and I’ll make a few phone calls, and then you and I will take a trip.”

  Romanov slipped out of the room; shortly afterward the music in the dining room was turned off and a telephone conversation started.

  Sitting on a chair, I fell asleep. I even began to dream. Romanov kept vanishing and then reappearing.

  “Listen. Do you have any possessions in the barracks?”

  “Everything I have is on me.”

  “That’s excellent, really excellent. There’ll be a car any moment and you and I will take a trip. Do you know where we’re going? You’ll never guess. All the way to Khattinakh, to headquarters! Have you ever been there? Well, I’m joking, joking. . . .”

  “I don’t mind one way or the other.”

  “That’s just fine.”

  I took off my boots, massaged my toes, and rewrapped my foot bindings.

  The pendulum clock on the wall showed half past eleven. Even if all that talk of Khattinakh was a joke, I still wouldn’t be going to work this night.

  A car sounded its horn just outside, and the headlights shone over the shutters and then the study ceiling.

  “Let’s go, let’s go.”

  Romanov was wearing a white fur jacket, a Yakut fur hat with earflaps, and embroidered reindeer-skin boots.

  I buttoned up my pea jacket, tightened my belt, and held my gloves over the stove.

  We went out to the truck. It was a one-and-a-half-ton truck with a covered back.

  “What’s the temperature today, Misha?” Romanov asked the driver.

  “Minus sixty, sir. The night brigades have been stood down.”

  So our brigade, the Shmeliov brigade, was in the barracks. I hadn’t been that lucky after all.

  “Right, Andreyev,” said the NKVD man, leaping about around me. “You get in the back. We don’t have far to go, and Misha will drive as fast as he can. Won’t you, Misha?”

  Misha said nothing. I got into the back, curled up in a ball, clutching my legs with my hands. Romanov squeezed himself into the cab, and we moved off.

  The road was bad and I was thrown about so much that I didn’t get cold.

  I didn’t want to think about anything, not that you can think in the cold.

  About two hours later lights were glimmering and the truck stopped by a two-story log cabin. It was dark everywhere. Only one window on the second story had a light burning. Two sentries in sheepskin coats were standing by the large porch.

  “Right, we’ve arrived, that’s excellent. He can stay here for a bit.” And Romanov disappeared up the big staircase.

  It was two in the morning. All the lights were turned off. Only the duty officer’s table lamp was on.

  I didn’t have to wait long. Romanov, who had already changed into an NKVD uniform, ran down the stairs and started waving his arms.

  “Over here, over here.”

  Together with the assistant duty officer, we went upstairs and stopped in the upper-story corridor outside a door that had a board on it: “Senior NKVD Officer Smertin.” Such a menacing pseudonym (which means “death” and couldn’t possibly be a real surname) made an impression even on me, despite my extreme fatigue.

  “That’s going too far for a pseudonym,” I thought, but I now had to enter and walk across an enormous room with a portrait of Stalin covering a whole wall; then I stopped at a desk of gigantic proportions and examined the pale, reddish face of a man who had spent his whole life in rooms like this one.

  Romanov was bowing respectfully by the desk.

  Senior NKVD officer Smertin fixed his lusterless blue eyes on me. He soon averted them; he was going through some papers, looking for something on the desk. Romanov’s fingers obligingly found what needed finding.

  “Surname?” asked Smertin, looking into the documents. “Name, patronymic? Article of Criminal Code? Sentence?”

  I replied.

  “Lawyer?”

  “Lawyer.”

  His pale face rose up from the desk top.

  “Have you been writing appeals?”

  “I have.”

  Smertin asked with a sniffling sound, “In exchange for bread?”

  “For bread, and just for the sake of it.”

  “Fine. Take him away.”

  I made not the slightest effort to sort out or ask anything. Why? At least I was out of the cold, not on the gold-mine night shift. They could sort out whatever they wanted.

  The deputy duty officer brought some note or other, and I was taken through the dark settlement to the very edge where four guard towers behind a triple barbed-wire fence protected the special confinement building, the camp prison.

  This prison had big cells and one-man cells. I was shoved into one of the one-man cells. I told the men already there who I was, not that I expected them to respond, and I didn’t ask them about anything. That was the usual thing to do, to stop people thinking you were a stool pigeon.

  Morning, the usual Kolyma winter morning, came, bringing no light and no sun; at first it was indistinguishable from night. An iron rail was banged and a bucket of steaming hot water was brought in. A guard came to fetch me, and I said goodbye to my fellow inmates. I knew nothing about them.

  I was brought back to the same building. It now seemed smaller than it had at night. This time I didn’t have the privilege of beholding Smertin.

  The duty officer told me to sit and wait, so I sat and waited until I heard a familiar voice: “That’s wonderful! That’s excellent! You’ll be off any moment.” When not on his own territory, Romanov addressed me as politely as he would a civilian.

  Thoughts were slowly, almost palpably revolving in my brain. I now had to think about something new, to which I was unaccustomed, something I didn’t know. This was nothing to do with the mine. If we were about to go back to my old Partisan gold mine, Romanov would have said, “We’ll be off any moment.” This meant that I was being taken somewhere else. To hell with it all, anyway!

  Romanov came almost leaping down the staircase. I thought at any moment he might climb onto the banister and slide down like a little boy. He was holding an almost entire loaf of bread.

  “Here, this is for the journey. And something else, too.” He vanished upstairs and came back with two herrings. “We’re doing things properly, aren’t we? I think that’s it. Ah, I forgot the most important thing, that’s because I don’t smoke myself.”

  Romanov went upstairs and reappeared with a newspaper. He’d put some tobacco in it. “Three matchboxes full, I reckon,” my experienced eye told me. A two-ounce pack of tobacco fills eight matchboxes—that was how tobacco was weighed out in the camps.

  �
�That’s for the journey. Daily rations, you could say.”

  I nodded.

  “Have they got an escort ready?”

  “They have,” said the duty officer.

  Romanov then went to the stairs and vanished.

  Two escort guards appeared: one older and pockmarked, wearing a tall sheepskin Caucasian hat; the other young, about twenty, rosy-cheeked, wearing a Red Army helmet.

  “This one,” said the duty officer, pointing at me.

  Both, the young one and the pockmarked one, very carefully examined me from head to toe.

  “Where’s the chief?” asked the pockmarked one.

  “Upstairs. And your package is there.”

  The pockmarked guard went upstairs and soon came back with Romanov.

  They had a quiet conversation, and the pockmarked man kept pointing at me.

  “All right,” Romanov finally said, “we’ll give you a note.”

  We went outside. By the porch, at the same place the little truck from the Partisan mine had stopped the night before, was a comfortable Black Maria, a prison bus with barred windows. I got in. The barred doors were closed, the guards took their places by the back doors, and the bus moved off. For some time the Black Maria followed the main highway that transverses the whole Kolyma peninsula, but then it turned off somewhere, and the road wound between bare hills. Every time it climbed a hill, the engine groaned. There were vertical rocks with a thin covering of larch forest and frost-covered branches of shrubby willow. In the end, after several turns among the hills, the bus followed a riverbed and emerged into a small clearing. Here the forest had been felled, there were guard towers, and in the middle, about three hundred yards from the edge, there were slanting towers and a dark mass of barracks, surrounded by barbed wire.

  The door of a tiny guard hut on the roadside was opened and the duty guard, a revolver on his belt, emerged.

  The bus stopped, but the engine was kept running.

  The driver leapt out of the cab and passed by my window.

  “You should see all those bends. No wonder it’s called Serpantinnaya, the Serpentine.”

  I had heard that name before, and it said more to me than Smertin’s ominous surname. The Serpantinnaya was the famous prison for trials and sentences, where so many people had perished the year before. Their corpses still hadn’t decomposed. Actually, their corpses would be intact forever—they were the dead men of the permafrost.

  The older guard went down the path toward the prison, while I sat by the window thinking my last hour had finally come, that it was my turn now. Thinking about death was just as hard as thinking about anything else. I didn’t try and picture my own execution by shooting: I just sat and waited.

  The winter twilight had already fallen. The door of the Black Maria was opened, and the older guard threw me some felt boots.

  “Get these on! Take off your cloth boots!”

  I took my cloth boots off and tried to get the felt boots on; they were too small.

  “You won’t make the journey in cloth boots,” said the pockmarked guard.

  “I will.”

  The pockmarked guard flung the felt boots into a corner of the bus.

  “Let’s go!”

  The bus turned around and sped away from Serpantinnaya.

  Soon I could tell by the number of trucks speeding past us that we were back on the main highway.

  The bus slowed down; the lights of a large settlement were burning all around us. The bus drove up to the porch of a brightly lit building and I went into a bright corridor, very much like the one in officer Smertin’s building. A duty officer with a pistol by his side was sitting behind a wooden barrier next to a wall telephone. This was the Yagodny settlement. Our first day’s journey had covered a mere seventeen kilometers. Where were we off to next?

  The duty officer showed me into a distant room that turned out to be an isolation cell with a trestle bed, a bucket of water, and a piss pot. A “spy hole” had been cut into the door.

  I spent two days there. I even managed to get the bandages on my legs more or less dry and to rewrap them. My legs were covered in festering scurvy sores.

  There was a backwoods sleepiness about the NKVD district section building. Sitting in my cubbyhole, I pricked up my ears to hear what I could. Even during the day hardly anyone’s boots were heard in the corridor. Keys were rarely turned in the lock, so the cell door was seldom open. The duty officer, always the same unshaven man in a quilted jacket with a Nagant revolver in his shoulder holster, also looked like a backwoodsman. It was not like Khattinakh, where Comrade Smertin made the major decisions. The telephone almost never rang.

  “Yes. He’s refueling. Yes. I don’t know, sir.”

  “Fine, I’ll tell them.”

  Whom were they talking about? My escort guards? Once a day, just before evening, my cell door was opened and the duty guard brought a pot of soup and a piece of bread.

  “Eat!”

  That was my dinner. Standard issue. And he brought a spoon, too. The second course was mixed with the first, poured into the soup.

  Each time I took the pot, ate the food, and, following the mine worker’s habit, licked the bottom of the pot until it shone.

  On the third day the door opened and the pockmarked soldier, wearing a sheepskin over his fur jacket, strode into the cell.

  “Well, had a good rest? Let’s go.”

  I stood on the porch. I thought we were setting off again in the prison bus, but the Black Maria was nowhere to be seen. An ordinary three-ton truck was standing by the porch.

  “Get in.”

  I obediently climbed in over the side.

  The younger soldier got into the cab next to the driver. The pock-marked one sat next to me. The truck moved off and a few minutes later we were on the main highway.

  Where was I being taken? North or south? West or east?

  There was no point asking, and the guard was not allowed to talk.

  Was I being taken to another zone, and if so, which?

  The truck shook about for many hours and then suddenly stopped.

  “We’ll have dinner here. Get out.”

  I got out.

  We went into one of the highway refectories.

  The highway is Kolyma’s artery and main nerve. Loads of equipment are constantly being moved in both directions. They are not guarded, but trucks with food are always escorted, in case escaped prisoners attack and rob them. An escort guard may not be much protection against the driver’s or contractor’s thefts, but he can stop general thieving.

  The refectories are places where you see geologists and prospectors for mining parties going on leave with their ruble bonuses, black-market tobacco and tea sellers, northern heroes and northern swine. Pure alcohol is always on sale in the refectories. People meet, argue, fight, exchange news, and are always in a hurry. They leave their trucks with the engines running and catch a few hours’ sleep in the cab, so that they can get a rest before moving on. This is where you see nice tidy groups of prisoners being taken up-country to the taiga, and filthy heaps of human slag being brought down from up-country, back from the taiga. Here you see the special-operations search parties, hunting for escaped prisoners. And you see the escaped prisoners, too, often wearing military uniform. Here the chiefs, the lords of everyone’s life and death, ride in ZIS limousines. A playwright ought to see this—it is in a roadside refectory that you get the best scenes of the north.

  I stood there, trying to squeeze my way close to the stove, an enormous barrel stove burning red-hot. The guards were not very worried about my trying to escape: I was obviously too weak. Anyone could see that a goner was not going to get anywhere when the temperature was minus fifty.

  “Sit over there, eat.”

  The guard bought me a plate of hot soup and gave me some bread.

  “We’ll be off again in a minute,” said the young one. “When my chief gets back, we’ll go.”

  But the pockmarked guard came back with
somebody else, a middle-aged soldier (they were still called “fighters” then) carrying a rifle and wearing a fur jacket. He looked first at me, then at the pockmarked guard.

  “Well, why not? That’s all right,” he said.

  “Let’s go,” the pockmarked guard told me.

  We moved to the opposite corner of the enormous refectory. A man wearing a pea jacket and a black flannel hat with earflaps, as worn by prisoners in the Baikal-Amur camps, was sitting curled up by the wall.

  “Sit down here,” the pockmarked guard told me.

  I obeyed and sank to the floor next to the man, who didn’t even turn his head.

  The pockmarked guard and the new soldier left. My young guard stayed with us.

  “They’re giving themselves a break, got it?” the man in the prisoner’s hat suddenly whispered to me. “They have no right to do that.”

  “Who cares what the bastards do?” I said. “They can do as they like. Does it bother you or something?”

  The man raised his head. “I’m telling you they don’t have the right.”

  “Where are they taking us?” I asked.

  “I don’t know where they’re taking you, but I’m going to Magadan. To be shot.”

  “To be shot?”

  “Yes. I’ve got a death sentence. I’m from the Western Administration, from Susuman.”

  I didn’t like that at all. But then I didn’t know the procedures that were followed for carrying out the death penalty. I felt embarrassed and said nothing.

  The pockmarked soldier and our new traveling companion came up.

  They started talking to each other. Whenever the number of guards increased, they became nastier and rougher. I was no longer bought soup in the refectory.

  A few more hours passed, and then three more men were brought to join us in the refectory. This made quite a significant batch.

  They were like all the goners in Kolyma. You could not tell how old these three men were; their puffy white skin and swollen faces were testimonies to starvation and scurvy. Their faces were covered with frostbite marks.

  “Where are you being taken?”